


i exist in two places, here and where you are

by mindshelter



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt Some Comfort, and morgan isn't biologically a stark, the fic where tony has dreams about peter and they're pretty okay up until they're not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:07:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21926458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mindshelter/pseuds/mindshelter
Summary: There’s so much I want to say, Tony thinks,I wish you weren’t gone, please, I hope you never blamed yourself for what happened, how could you say sorry to me when all you ever did was try your best—In which Tony Stark gets by with a Peter Parker-shaped hole in his chest, has an annoyingly overactive imagination, and starts collecting digital trinkets he thinks the kid might like.He also starts volunteering at an orphanage that accommodates kids with decimated parents. There, he meets a hotheaded girl with the same name as Pepper’s eccentric uncle.or;a christmas-adjacent post-iw fic, with some twists.
Relationships: Morgan Stark (Marvel Cinematic Universe) & Tony Stark, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Comments: 10
Kudos: 171





	i exist in two places, here and where you are

**Author's Note:**

> (title taken from margaret atwood's poem, "corpse song")

( _I dreamt—_ )

_In the vastness of space, ever-growing and on its way to atrophy, it seems like the Benatar is just barely sputtering along, suspended in gel._ _The universe is alive with burning gas and plasma, strung along like sinew, filament, nerve._

_Tony slumps against the glass wall of the ship to take in every detail._

_Peter takes a seat nearby, crouched in a squatting position so that their knees are bumping. His head is turned towards the window, watching the outside. Tony is watching Peter. The curve of his nose, the way he stares in wide-eyed wonder. Tony fights the urge to smile; Peter had gotten the same look on his face the first day he was invited into the lab, flitting about hummingbird-fast from one spot to another._

_How fast is this fucking ship going? A mile a year?_

_Twiddling his still nanite-enrobed thumbs, Peter says, “Hey, Mr. Stark?”_

_“Yeah, Pete?” It comes out as a whisper. The words are not his; Tony does not think them. They fall out of his mouth against his own volition._

_“I love the stars,” Peter says._

_He draws an imaginary line along some of the brightest spots in a sea of black._

_“When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut, and see space for myself. One birthday May and Ben got me a glow-in-the-dark sticker kit. I borrowed books about astronomy from the library and used the pictures to make my own constellations on the wall.”_

_Tony has his reservations about space—and perfectly justified ones, at that—but if Peter likes space, then maybe it has some redeeming qualities. He can imagine it: a skinny boy, a mere four-something feet with five-hundred-degree vision watching cable TV._

_“Not surprising,” Tony quips, “I bet you used to tune in faithfully every time a new episode of Clone Wars aired.”_

_Peter scoffs. “Excuse you, I’m not a scrub; I also watched all the reruns.”_

_“Of course, of course. How could I forget.” Tony tries to shift a bit and finds that he can’t. The words keep tumbling out. He just wants to hold the kid, make sure he’s real. “We’ll get a telescope when we get home. We can drive out of state where there’s less light pollution. Stargaze on a picnic mat. Find the Big Dipper, or some shit.” Cassiopeia. Pegasus. Andromeda._

_Peter laughs, and he finally turns to grin at the man. “Or some shit,” he echoes, moving forward to grasp gently at Tony’s shoulder. “Tony.”_

_Tony tries to bring a hand up to Peter’s hair. To move, to bring this young man into his arms._

_He can’t._

_“Yeah?” he says._

_“Tony,” Peter says. “Tony—Tony.”_

_Tony’s eyebrows furrow. Peter’s voice sounds layered. There’s his familiar, youthful lilt and then a sterner one under it, more feminine, coarse, raspy._

_It starts to fizz to the surface, blotting out the kid’s face—_

( _—it was so real_.)

“Tony,” Nebula says.

Nebula. The same name as the gas clouds outside, the explosions in progress. Dark eyes, wholly black. Nothing like the stars.

Tony blinks a few times, shaking his head to stun himself back in place. He’s still resting against the window, but the ship seems colder, somehow. Dim.

“…Bluebell.”

“Tony,” Nebula repeats, nose twisting at her nickname. Her hand—the right one, the flesh one, clenches at Tony’s arm. “Are you alright?”

He pushes himself up, nodding once, twice. The first time is to reassure Nebula, and the second one is to convince himself.

“I’m alright,” he says, latching onto Nebula’s sleeve to keep himself level. His body weighs so little; he is so heavy. “I’m alright.”

“You weren’t responding,” she parries. Nebula pulls out a bag of freeze-dried food, not yet opened. She holds it in front of him. “Eat something; it will keep you lucid.”

_Lucid is overrated_ , Tony thinks, but he looks at Nebula’s face, stern as ever, the meal replacement in her hand, and the stars beyond the airlock. _How many days have we been here?_

After some mutual stubbornness, the bar ends up broken in half, and Tony teaches Nebula how to say cheers, tapping their chalky meals together.

They eat in silence.

__

The way the world ends is not with a bang, but with a whimper that sounds eerily like—

“I lost the kid.”

It’s with a _mewl_ , a pathetic wisp of fight that snaked around Tony's palm. He held it for just a second—and for a brief, hopeful moment it was corporeal, alive between his fingers and it glowed against his flesh until Tony could see the ivory of his bones—

—and then it dissolved into cords of foul smoke, thinning into strands, threads, nothing.

Nothing at all.

Tony sits at the end of the world. It’s in upstate New York, on the balcony overlooking a lush expanse of grass, emerald and pearly with fresh rainfall. He sits above a sea of gemstone ground. Thin. Tired. Always tired. 

The sun needs to get a new hobby, if it’s going to keep rising over the horizon every damn day.

A fleece blanket is draped over his lap, and a bag of electrolyte solution trails just behind him on a wheeled stand, trickling fluid into the space under his collarbone. Nutrients, antimicrobials. He’d upgraded from being fed spoonfuls of sugar, but the med team still errs on the careful side for fear of causing any complications. 

His abdomen is a basin, bordered by ashen, chilled flesh. There’s not enough blood perfusing through his body. The sharp downturn leading to his stomach follows firm skin that clings and squeezes at his ribs, catching every curve and arch with a neurotic level of detail. Right under the bend of his bones are his lungs, gas diffusing between his blood and the hollow cavity of his chest.

His heart aches as it had before, as it always will.

__

He stays at the compound for nearly three weeks, where he and the other occupants skitter past each other like scared animals. They are new tenants, having wordlessly declared squatter’s rights over his absence.

Tony finds that he doesn’t particularly care. They can have the fucking compound; it’s over now. The end of the world has come and gone.

_The rest is silence_ , Tony mouths.

As soon as he’s well enough, he and Pepper move out of the Avengers compound and back to New York. They pick a penthouse suite in Manhattan. The first night there, Tony sleeps for sixteen hours straight. 

(Natasha was there with a head of platinum hair the day Happy drove him and Pepper back to the city.

Her hand settled on Tony’s shoulder, and he let her. “I’ll be seeing you,” she said. 

It sounded like a guarantee. It always does, coming from her. The tight squeeze Natasha had given him lingers long after the compound fades out of sight.)

Rhodey comes back from relief efforts looking like he’d had to climb out of hell unaided. Regardless, he smiles when he sees Tony, pulls out a dining room chair for himself, and sits with his best friend.

He talks about the current state of affairs—Carol is off-world again, Nat’s thrown herself into work, Thor is in Norway, Bruce is with Thor in Norway, and Steve is… roaming, meandering about like a goddamn ghost from the early 20th century, but nearby. Tony knows Nebula has departed as well, with the raccoon, still searching for a solution. Off-world as of last week. They’d already toddled about on Earth for far too long.

She’d come to say goodbye in person. He’d dialed down on the bitterness the best he could, taught Nebula how to twirl spaghetti noodles around a fork, and wished them only a moderately dangerous trip.

They have no idea about Clint. Total radio silence.

“Nat asked about you.”

“My golly gee, isn’t that nice?”

“Steve actually spends a good chunk of time in Brooklyn, actually, between New York and the compound. At VA and such.”

“Ohhh, gimme his address. I’ll spray paint a large dick on the windows.”

Rhodey levels Tony with a look.

“What? Should I do two instead?”

“ _Tones_.”

“Yeah, that’s right, I’m going to be a bitch about it.”

Rhodey says nothing.

“Work with me here. Bright green or magenta?”

Rhodey throws his hands up in the air. “Why are you asking me when you’d clearly go with green—never mind, that’s not the point. They obviously miss you, even if they aren’t saying it outright, and that’s as true as it is a guilt trip.”

_I miss them too_.

Tony sighs into his seat. “Yeah,” he says. “I know. I’m just—not now. Please don’t make me do this now.”

They’ve had discussions like this so very many times. The weight of failure sits heavy on his shoulders, nursing on the marrow of his bones.

Rhodey nods. “Yeah. I just wanted to let you know.” He uses his foot to give Tony a light nudge on the leg. “No pressure, or anything.” He pauses. “Actually, maybe a small amount of pressure.”

“I think about them and it just reminds me of everything that went wrong,” Tony confesses, less to Rhodey and more to his hands. This is the finale of some twisted Rube-Goldberg sequence that began from the moment he met Howard’s magnum opus. Perhaps long before that.

Lines of dominoes falling, marbles twisting down slides and setting off incident after incident until they’ve made it here, to this terrible right now.

Rhodey dips his head. He holds out a hand to his best friend of three decades, and Tony takes it.

James Rhodes has always been an exceptional bright spot in his life. Even though he’d spent most of his adulthood not deserving it. Even through the hazy marathons of paper squares, molly, puking his intestines and colon and liver out from all the liquor he could binge, Rhodey was high contrast against a fuzzy background. Is.

Tony is the first to run a knife down the fresh silence.

“So—lime?” Rhodey rolls his eyes. “Lemon or electric?”

“Electric, man—that stuff burns your eyes the moment you look at it.”

“This is why I love you, Honeybear; you have such _taste_.”

“Shut up, Tony. You just love me in general.”

“Mmm, yeah.”

__

_~~Rogers,~~ _

_~~Steve~~ _

_~~Cap I know we’re just both too fucking stubborn and saddled with pride that really neither of us have properly earned to say uncle and call it a day, but I’m too exhausted to be angry now. I’ve been angry for two years. More than that, now. I’ve spent my entire life angry~~ _

_The convoy I was travelling with was ambushed. You know this. I got shrapnel to the heart from my own missile. No one survived but me._

_Pepper and I went on a road trip of sorts after I made it back._ _I started in California and worked my way East. When we got to Virginia, I made a joke to Pepper about it, but she didn’t find me funny that day. There were six soldiers from Cali, just the one from Nevada, another from Utah. Five from Alabama and Georgia—the list goes on, but I’ll keep the one here non-exhaustive. I think you get the idea._

_Some of the families brought me in and would force a cup of coffee, tea on Pepper or me. I ate a stupid quantity of butter cookies and banana bread. Some sat us down in the living room and had us look at their photo albums. A lot of them never answered the doorbell. A few shook their heads no and said they weren’t in the mood, and others slammed the door in my face. Some screamed at me to fuck off._

_They were able to put my face to why their child was dead. ~~The convoy was meant to protect good ol’ civilian me, but little did they know the danger was in the Jeep backseat, already halfway drunk. Tony Stark was their death sentence.~~ People always try to make sense of things. Find some meaning. Find an outlet. Find a target. _

_I’m not reciting you a sob-story or offering you some armchair psychology justification for what happened between us. There’s no denying I was sloppy. Proud of my weapons on the pure basis of ingenuity. Dead on the inside._

_I wasn’t a good person. I’m still not sure now._

_So I get it. If they didn’t use Barnes to do the job, they would have used someone else. They probably just sent him because they found the irony of it all funny._

_But it’s his face, his name. When I ask myself, “Who killed my mom?” my brain supplies James Buchanan Barnes before it corrects to HYDRA. I’m working on that._

_~~Honestly, Steve, fuck you, I thought that we were more than just friends by circumstance~~_

_~~You were my brother. Was I ever yours? How did we end up here?~~ _

_But bottom line, I don’t trust you. I get it, and I’m sorry you lost him, I fucking mean it, but by no means am I going to be happy if I have to look you in the eye in the near future._

__

Pepper rarely leaves his side and Tony hardly wants to complain. His wish, now, is to be around her all the time. She’s his tether.

But that’s no good at all, no good at all. What an awful, jagged burden to bear that would be. It is not the prerogative of a woman to fix and heal a broken man, to carefully glue his pieces back together until the same shards cut into her own hands and she bleeds red and burns oil hot from problems and messes that were never hers. No one deserves that, Tony thinks, but especially not Pepper.

No one is to blame but him if she wants to take a step back.

He not-so-subtly gives her the go-ahead to attend meetings in person rather than constant video conferences; she’s still working hard at supplying emergency services and sending the Avengers funding for rescue work, damage mitigation and whatnot.

“I love you,” Pepper says, out of the blue.

“Yeah,” Tony replies. “I love you too. So much.”

“I also _like_ you,” Pepper chastises. Something sad flashes across her face, and she looks at him seriously, curling to his side. Her slender hand rests against the center of his chest. “I thought you were gone.”

“Apparently I’m kind of impossible to get rid of,” he says. “Like a stubborn tick.”

“A handsome tick, I hope.”

“Oh, ruggedly so, but I’ll keep that to myself to give his ego a break.”

They both chuckle a little at the not-really-a-joke and pull each other closer.

“You’re perfect,” he says.

“Hmm.”

“Take some time for yourself, Pep.” He breathes her in. She is elderflower soap, his Black Sabbath t-shirt loose on her shoulders, a calm sea. There are wrinkles framing her face that hadn’t been there before. They match his own. “I’ll be okay.”

The next day they hold hands through post-apocalypse Manhattan, Pepper keeping her pace slow so Tony doesn’t run out of breath. A sad hush blankets the topography of the city and other people can be seen walking about, floating from place to place without any particular destination.

By the next week she’s away from him for more than twenty-four hours for the first time, getting things sorted in New Jersey and the Avengers compound. It was inevitable. The decimation took place close to two months ago; it’s June, now.

June. The world has to get back on its feet, it’s been two months since April, since Peter died. Peter is dead, Peter died galaxies from home, all the way back in April and now it’s June and he’s gone, died looking Tony in the eye and saying fucking _sorry_ , it was in April—

( _And if you died, I feel like that’s on me. I don’t need that on my conscience._

_I’m sorry._

Dust.

_I’m sorry._

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why did he say that to him, impose that kind of burden on a child?)

Tony spends most of the day staring at the ceiling.

He’d tried to tinker since landing back on Earth, but it just culminates in him staring and staring and staring at each render, each line of code like it’s nonsense.

And that, among everything else, threatens to block up his throat with frustration.

Even alone, left for dead, he had his numbers, he had his brain—but now he can’t fucking _focus_.

The schematics don’t sink in. His pointer finger follows the sequences of logic gates cast in holographic light, each bearing the same frequency and shine as the arc reactor’s glow, but then they falter because Tony’s mind is wandering, all tangled up. The messy wires of Christmas lights taken out of retirement from its cardboard box.

Maybe he should go back to sleep.

That’s his hobby, these days, aside from imploding.

Somehow, twenty minutes later, he finds himself sitting at the kitchen table, the recording app on his phone open.

__

_june_8_2018.mp3_

“I—I don’t know why I’m doing this, bud. This probably isn’t healthy, but—I… I’m not sure where I was going with this. Look at me, huh? Tony Stark, at a loss for words.

Well, hm, let’s start with Happy. He—Happy cried last week. Impressively hard—never seen anything like it. He barely shed a tear when Bluebell—that's Nebula, an alien—and I landed back on Earth. Not when we drove down together to Queens, back to yours and May’s place, not when we packed up your things and cleared all the rotting food from the kitchen. I hope the Greek yogurt in the fridge belonged to May, by the way. That stuff is a plight on humanity. Chalk on the tongue and not worth the protein.

He misses you, Pete. With my track record, which is an innumerable number of times worse than yours—though you were kind of getting there, kid, props to you—I’d say that out of the two of us he definitely expected me to go out first. Kind of fucked up to say, but I’m guessing that on some level he’s been emotionally prepared for me to die for years. Losing you caught him so off-guard.

I was supposed to hit the hay before you. That was always the plan, Pete. I had a plan for everything. Your biometrics were all saved to my servers, you were going to have full, unconditional access to FRI to—to guide you if I died.

I don’t have a plan for this, Peter, I didn’t want to have a plan for this, you were just—you were just so young. I don’t know what to do. I miss you. Shit. I miss you so much.

God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Pete.”

__

_june_15_dandelions.jpg_

Spider-man no longer makes appearances around the city. People put two and two together.

There are no florist shops open and too many people to mourn, too few bodies to bury. But people always make do with what they have—and what they have is twine, rubber bands, and lots of wild dandelions.

New York misses Spider-man, too.

It wasn't funny, but Tony laughed when he saw the little shrine.

The picture he takes is of the haphazard pile of Spider-man toys and newspaper cutouts in the lush green of Central Park’s grounds. It’s surrounded by cards, some candles here and there. There are countless bouquets of weeds, each wildflower round and gold as the sun. The air had smelled like sap.

__

_july_1_cat.jpg_

Peter loved cats. He used to be allergic, before the spider bite, but the second he’d come in contact with peanut butter without the inconvenience of anaphylactic shock, the idiot began to systemically work through every single one of his previous vices. Grass, cashews, _bananas_. Kid used to be allergic to _bananas_.

And, of course, cute, furry animal dander.

Tony’s since heard plenty of accounts of Murphy, the fluffy bodega cat.

This one, in the picture, is rather small—a skinny stray with silver fur and astoundingly round eyes, almost completely black against marine blue irises.

When he’d spotted the little thing, Tony had sighed. “Everything’s gotta remind me of you, huh?” he said.

Tony took it to an animal shelter.

__

_Tony is with Peter again. They’re not on the Benatar this time. Instead, they’re sitting cross-legged on a ragged bedsheet, draped over grassland._

_He still doesn’t feel entirely real, but the rise and fall of the kid’s chest smothers it to the point of being bearable._

_“I love the stars,” Peter says. His grin is toothy._

_Tony can feel Peter’s head shift every now and then to drink in the sight of the stars, the rusty halo of the Milky Way. Every speck is high contrast against a gradient of darker hues, the dimmer stars existing in such incredible quantities that it resembles faded static._

_“Cassiopeia,” Peter mumbles, bringing an arm up to draw an imaginary line across the sky. “Pegasus. The Andromeda galaxy is the big glowing dot to the left of it.”_

_“You really know your stuff, huh,” Tony says. The words are not his. Every time he tries to speak the abstractions bubble up in his mind and pop before they can make it to his throat, and his mouth and limbs run whatever script it’s churned up for this round._

_During the procedure to remove shrapnel from his chest, the anesthesiologist had knocked him out with a hefty dose of ketamine. It had put him to sleep quickly, but it hadn’t been restful one. Tony could best describe it as getting poked with a needle one moment and then rousing in the PACU the next, barely registering the catheter through the gaps of his spinal cord. There had been no time interval in-between._

_It’s like that now, except he’s pretty sure he’s not on any drugs._

_“I had my astronaut phase just like everybody else,” Peter says. “One birthday May and Ben got me a glow-in-the-dark sticker kit. I borrowed books about astronomy from the library and used the pictures to make_ _my own constellations on the wall.”_

_Tony hums._

_A view like this is hard to come by, especially for someone like Peter, who is from a place that doesn’t understand the meaning of lights out. Who’d spent most of his life in New York, much less out of the state or out of the country._

_Peter moves to lie down against the bedsheet, and Tony follows suit. Back against the ground, staring up._

_“You find the North star,” Peter says. “That’s your reference point for everything else.”_

_For the next little while, Peter guides Tony through the constellations he remembers. Pisces the fish, situated under Pegasus. Aries, Taurus. Tony squints and draws out the little dipper with minimal assistance. He scoffs when Peter claps softly._

_He is phasing in and out of himself, transient to his own body. But it’s fine. This is nice._

_The universe above him is alive with burning gas and plasma, strung along like sinew, filament, nerve. Tony fears it; being lost to its whims, alone in pitch-black nothing. But the sky is bright, and he’s got some of the best company in the world._

__

Every time he tries to speak the abstractions bubble up in his mind and pop before they can make it to his throat, and his mouth runs whatever script it’s churned up for this round.

Tony is with Peter, again and again. Tony will try to bring Peter into his arms, but his mind cannot will it.

Every time, they are stargazing.

Every time, Peter fades away somehow—he was replaced with Nebs, that first time. Sometimes he just vanishes without warning. Other times, Peter begins to crumble.

Every time, Tony is powerless.

Dust.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

__

Tony wakes with an excruciating desire to disappear.

Which is inconceivably unfair, considering that yesterday was really, truly passable. It’d been one of the days Tony felt like he could weather his way through the rest of his life if he just tried hard enough. Like there’d been just enough rainfall to loosen up the sludge that wraps around his legs, runny enough to trudge through.

He thinks Pepper is saying something to him, but the sounds get all smeared and blotted out, mashed into a pulpy glob by a mortar and pestle. He shakes his head a few times, trying to do a system reboot before he opens his eyes again and sees his fiancée’s face. Her lips are downturned, but her gaze is kind.

“Bad day today?”

Pepper settles back under the covers and holds Tony’s face, fingers brushing the messy stubble across his jaw. The cool band of her engagement ring, white gold, presses against his cheek. A younger Tony, a stupider Tony might have backed away, but they’re far past _She can’t see me like this_ and _I can’t even stand myself like this, why should she?_

“I—” Tony tries. “I don’t know what’s _with_ me,” he says.

But he does know—they both do, and they both know that they know. And Tony is so frustrated because while he was floating in space what kept him sane was a desperation to know that he had at least _someone_ left back on Earth.

Pepper had thought he was dead _again_. He keeps doing this to her. He has a veritable talent for it, even when he’s not trying. It’s not something to be proud of. 

He made it back, but Tony thinks he left a piece of himself out there, among the stars. A sharp corner had snatched something while he was running, and he didn’t even notice until the tear was a rip, uninterrupted all the way down his spirit.

It’s different from the Chitauri invasion on New York—he came back from those _different_ , like someone had messed with his hardware. His body used to sing, to scream with urgency, a foreshortened future. Visceral, directionless dread. No courage to keep his eyes closed unless his armor was accessible within a moment’s notice or less.

Every day had felt like the last but this— _for many a time he has been half in love with easeful Death_ —but this—

This is knowing tomorrow is coming, unrelenting. Tony is alive, and he doesn’t quite know how to handle it.

Pepper’s walked away from him before and he’s fully willing to admit it stung like a bitch, but he understood. He’s a mess. There’s only so much _Tony_ a person can handle. It’d overtaken even himself, so worried and preoccupied by the inevitable end of the world that he’d just pushed the very things he’d been trying to keep safe away.

Years of preparation, obsession, nights of poring over data, and this is what it’s amounted to.

A skinny middle-aged man in threadbare pajamas who struggles to get out of bed.

He used to fear sleep. It meant ceding control, and control was everything. Autonomy was everything.

Now, when he closes his eyes, he doesn’t have to see hell, and he can pretend he doesn’t have to face it. Reality is worse outside this microcosm of him and Pepper.

He tries to say it in a way Pepper can easily understand, in the fewest words possible.

The sentence that comes out of his mouth is, “I miss him.”

Pepper gives him a sad smile.

“We can lie down for a bit longer,” Pepper says gently. “How about another ten minutes?”

“Okay,” Tony says. He purses his lips together. “I’m sorry.”

Pepper shakes her head. “Ten minutes, and then we can make breakfast.”

New York is a mortuary. He is embalmed against the mattress.

“Okay,” Tony says.

Then, following a deep, brave breath, “I don’t think I can go outside today.”

A kiss. “Thank you for letting me know. We’ll try again tomorrow?”

“Of course.” Living is labor. “Of course.”

__

Between mouthfuls of eggs, hash browns, and sips of bitter coffee:

“I still want to marry you—you know that, right?” Pepper says lightly.

“Oh, isn’t that serendipitous?” is the reply. “I do too.”

__

Time eludes him often now, but when August 10th rolls in, Tony buys a box of funfetti cake mix and tacky wax candles. Within the afternoon he has a misshapen, sugary concoction cooling on kitchen rack.

Pepper stocked up on everything, so there’s a hand blender available that Tony uses to whip up some heavy cream and sugar.

The viscous stuff thickens and grows fluffier until he can scrape at it with a spatula and apply it all over the cake, soft and airy and studded with rainbow sprinkles. Finally, candles are stabbed in, the same myriad of colors as the inside of the pastry. 

He calls Happy. They both eat a slice and then Tony makes him take half the leftovers home.

Once he’s driven off again, Tony stands by the kitchen island, staring at the dirty dishes, the saran-wrapped food, waiting for Pepper to come back from her meeting and realizes, with a short, swift jab to the gut, that he’s lonely.

__

_aug_2018_birthday.mov_

Tony hums the notes to _Happy Birthday_ quietly while Happy picks at his food, resolutely not looking at the camera. The recording is thirty seconds long, and no one says a thing.

__

_aug_28_nyc.mov_

Grief recedes. Grief spikes like freak waves, climbing over the hull of ships. Grief is a sudden, overpowering force, dragging the sturdiest down under the water to rust and drown.

Even with half of everyone gone, the artificial lighting of New York still overpowers the more distant glimmer of the stars. It is still an epicenter, now for humanitarian aid and maintaining connections with the rest of the world. He’s joined Pep and Rhodey in coordinating it all for a while, now.

Pisces the fish, situated under Pegasus. Aries, Taurus. Only visible further upstate, at the end of long stretches of unpaved road, flanked by trees and shrubbery.

The sky back at home is a plain, inky smear, but the skyline is dotted with glittery white red yellow. Tony sits on a flat cement roof, wind rustling through gray hair. He is high up. He cannot drown here. Peter is not here to begin with, so Tony does not have to watch him disappear.

He’d always complained that dealing with Peter’s bold streak would give him gray hairs. He thinks he’s gotten way more than ever before now that the kid is gone, though.

“Your home,” Tony tells the camera, voice steady, “it lives on.” _We’ll make sure it does._

__

Math, it seems, is the language he defaults to. What follows is his mother’s tongue, spun and refined by those who had made their home in the peninsula south of the Apennine mountains.

Finally, English. The language of the press and the public. It’s what he used while enrolled in the best private school money could buy to make sense of Shelley, Keats, Plath.

He thinks in numbers, inputs and outputs, disjunction, conjunction. Tony is no god. He cannot correlate all the contents of the universe—but computation is just a cascade of operations; trues, falses, and, or. 

By all accounts, this decision doesn’t seem all that calculated. Regardless, it feels like a monumental one, though Tony can’t put his finger on as to why.

One time, Peter had run late on his visit to the compound because he’d lost track time playing basketball—as Spider-man—with some kids at a nearby elementary school, dribbling well past sunset. Upstate, stars were sparkling in the sky when Peter finally arrived, but Tony figured he’d probably made those kids’ entire _lives_. Spider-man had been getting pretty popular with the locals.

Friendly neighborhood Spider-man. Takes down weapons dealers. Will let random kids challenge him to basketball. Plays too many video games. So fucking smart.

Anyhow, back to the webpage he has opened. 

There’s a few positions open—food preparation, assistance during arts and crafts time, and storytelling.

Reading sounds simple enough. Right?

He can read aloud, off a page. To children. He’s Tony Stark—if anyone can do it, it's him.

There’s just—there has to be more he can do. Some other way he can apply himself. A lot of people had issues with him because of his usual habit of providing funding and resources but then otherwise being too, as they say, hands-off.

_(If you cared, Peter had said once, you’d actually be here.)_

Apparently, it’s a sign of apathy. Which sucks, because it’s probably something Tony picked up from Howard.

He’s working on it—this phenomenon called proper communication and making sure all parties are tuned to the right frequency.

This is on a smaller scale, but that doesn’t… make it disingenuous. Make it insincere.

He clicks the application form and starts filling it out.

__

_“I love the stars,” Peter says._

_No._

_No, please._

_Not again. Wake up. Wake up, wake the fucking fuck up—_

_An imaginary line across the sky._

_The words are not his._

_“Pegasus. The Andromeda galaxy is the big glowing dot to the...”_

__

( _I dreamt that we had a kid, it was so real._ )

__

Jesus. He’s tired.

On his first day at the South Manhattan chapter of children’s group homes—just say orphanage, everyone’s thinking it—Tony had spent the morning daydreaming of aspirin. His headache intensifies the second he hears the shrill noises of children chattering from down the hallway. Even through the stretch of distance as a facility employee unlocks the front door and welcomes him inside, Tony needs to take a deep breath to steady himself.

Maybe this was a bad idea.

The employee, amusedly, _bows_ and thanks him profusely for coming. She’s a young woman, late twenties at best, and she looks overworked, stray locks of dark hair sticking out in multiple directions, escaping out of a haphazard ponytail.

Tony mumbles a “yeah, sure” while she guides him to the front desk and starts explaining his job another time, still pointedly not meeting his eyes. He gets a short stack of papers to sign, and then they’re off to get oriented.

The building is brightly lit with yellow lights, and outside of the staff office there’s a corkboard covered in first-aid certifications. Near the kitchens, Tony sees a wide fish tank. Nearly all the tables are close to the ground and the chairs are small in the dining area, which is mostly vacated. The kids are mostly mingling closer to the back, where there are toys and LEGOs and filthy beanbag chairs.

These kids, with dusted parents, with no family that came to take them in, had gotten placed in 24-hour-daycare. Some were found crying, shaking at the back of a car, still strapped to their booster seats while the front seats were empty. Others had been in the grocery cart while their mothers or fathers skimmed the aisles for dinner.

They have a daily timetable of lessons on another end of the building—math, reading, simple science concepts. They wake up every day at 8:00 a.m., and lunch is served a half-hour to noon. School-related things are done by mid-afternoon and then the kids come back.

That’s where Tony comes in. Iron Man will be reading small children stories.

It’s whatever, this can’t be too daunting—

“OW!”

Suddenly, an audible thunk sounds from the other side from the room and a shout of pain that sounds like it belongs to a young boy.

Said young boy runs past Tony and takes cover behind a bookshelf right as a glue stick flies across the room. It’s coming from an enthused, furious little girl. She has another glue stick in her hand.

“EAT GLUE!”

Then she yells, veritably feral, and hurls it forcefully.

“Not again,” Tony hears the supervisor swear under her breath before cupping her hands around her mouth like a makeshift megaphone. “Morgan! No throwing, please!”

“Morgan’s throwing stuff!”

“Well Matt called my drawing ugly! He’s ugly! Ugly, ugly!”

“Matthew, Morgan, please,” the supervisor says. “No calling each other or the things others make ugly, okay?”

Tony watches the whole spectacle with detached interest. The supervisor is fumbling—she’s obviously tired, and unsure of how to handle both of them without further angering the other. The other staff members on shift seem to be on their lunch break.

Morgan—a little girl with chestnut brown hair—is pink in the face, big eyes shiny. Her fists are clenched to the side, fingers stained with hopefully washable ink.

Tony tilts his head to get a look at the supervisor’s name tag. She—Angie with a smiley face—flits her eyes between Morgan and Matt and then back at Tony, looking so out-of-sorts that he contemplates having her sit before she risks an impromptu trip to the ground.

Mistaking his concern for judgement, Angie with a smiley face says, frantically, “Mr. Stark, I am so sorry, those two just don’t get along—Morgan is a temperamental one and Matt’s not doing himself any favors either—”

Tony suppresses a sigh. He doesn’t have the energy for this. “It’s fine,” he says.

“I—”

He does sigh this time. “It’s fine,” he echoes. “Why don’t you check on Matt and get your coworker back in here for backup? I’ll keep Morgan company.”

Angie mutters, “God give me strength,” but she nods and coaxes a teary Matt out of the room. With the spectacle over, the rest of the kids just get back to playing.

Tony walks up to Morgan, who’s still rooted to the same spot, pouting with all her might.

“Hey,” Tony says, “you got any glue left that I have to worry about?”

She shakes her head. Like the boy, she looks on the verge of tears, and Tony wonders if it’s from lingering anger or if she thinks an adult is about to chew her out.

Tony’s not too adept with emotions, or children. Tech smarts doesn’t really translate into whatever… this is. He’s not sure how he ended up here, specifically, at a group home for children with decimated parents.

“You’ve got a good arm,” Tony says. “Ever consider baseball?”

Morgan toys with the hem of her shirt. Ink from her hands—a sky blue—rubs against white cotton and leaves some unfortunate smudges. “I like soccer.”

“Soccer’s neat,” Tony says, trying to think of other conversation topics. He doesn’t think he’s spoken to someone this small in years. “So what were you drawing?”

Morgan stops kneading at her clothes and looks up at Tony. Her eyes are huge and shiny, even as they’re squinting with apprehension.

Then she runs off.

Oh.

Okay, then.

That happened.

Except Morgan’s back a few seconds later with a sheet of beige construction paper in her hands. “I drew this,” she says, holding the thing up.

Tony blinks a few times. If he’s being honest, he’s not actually all that sure what it is. It’s got four legs, is cream colored and kind of fuzzy looking. The sky is a garish blue, and, of course, there’s the classic sun in the corner of the page, topped off with a happy face like a cherry on a sundae. In the corner, in wobbly, big writing, is the name _Gerald_.

“That’s a nice,” Tony says, “horse?”

Morgan’s eyebrows scrunch up, and she looks a little annoyed, but not mad. “It’s not a horse.”

“Right, of course.” He whips up a quick lie. “My bad—you’ll have to help me a bit here—I have, er, bad vision. Positive four-hundred degrees in both eyes.”

Morgan accepts the excuse. “It’s an alpaca,” she says, proudly.

“Ohh.” Tony hums as if it makes perfect sense, scrutinizing the art a bit more. That explains the ridiculous long neck and the ears. “I like it. Sucks that Matt called it ugly. Don’t—throw glue, though, I guess.” 

“I guess,” Morgan mumbles, quieter now that she remembers that she had used glue as a projectile weapon.

The conversation dies off.

Then, “Who are you?”

“I’m Tony.”

She holds out a hand. “I’m Morgan,” she says. Tony takes the hand and gives it a shake—her whole hand fits into his loose fist. “Thanks for liking my drawing.”

__

About half an hour later, once Tony’s tour of the place has been finished, a glue ban has been imposed on Morgan and Matt has been reprimanded for being unpleasant, Angie officially introduces Iron Man to the kids.

Some of them had recognized him already—this group is all four to six-year-olds—while others were familiar with Iron Man, but not Tony Stark. Many of them _ooh_ and _aah_ , expressions curious.

“This is Mr. Stark,” Angie says. “Everyone please give him a warm welcome.”

There’s a chorus of _Hello, Mr. Starks_.

Tony waves. “You can all call me Tony,” he says.

Afterwards, Angie directs him to a small collection of books he can pick for his first assignment.

He slides a hardcover off the shelf.

It’s called _The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane_. He’s never seen this book before; the cover is of a toy rabbit in a carmine suit, standing upright and facing a golden-lit doorway. The porch light casts a long shadow. He runs a finger across the textured silver seal next to the title, distinguishing the book as an award-winning piece.

The children settle around him on the carpet, a cheap thing with cartoonish cars and trucks and trains, all watching him. All waiting for the story to start.

Tony clears his throat, uncapping his bottle of water to take a few sips. He opens the book to the first page.

“Once,” he says, “in a house on Egypt street, there lived a rabbit made almost entirely of china. He had china arms and china legs, china paws and a china head…”

__

Twice a week, Tony comes in and reads.

Tony downloads the e-book and reads it before bed. It’s not very long and Tony skims the whole thing in just over an hour. After he’s done, though, he goes back to the start and mouths the words. 

Sometimes, Pepper reads the stories over his shoulder. 

The rowdy kids of the not-orphanage all go eerily quiet whenever he reads. He learns how to make dramatic pauses, how to pace his words to that the children are at the edges of their metaphorical seats.

__

In quieter moments where all Tony hears his white noise, watching the fat raindrops from thunderclouds clang and thump against the glass panes of his and Pepper’s penthouse suite, he imagines Peter sitting with him.

The kid loved the rain, the lyrical chime of white noise and the way the fall of water darkens each building, giving way to moist air—clean and sweet and fresh.

Tony would be annotating and highlighting the driest documents in the world to send to SI’s legal team and Peter would be half-heartedly solving the exercises in his calculus workbook. Normally chatty, Peter would finally be still, save for the perpetual bounce of his leg.

They’d listen to the rain as they went about their own tasks, just content to be in the same room. To have each other’s company, be in each other’s orbit.

__

“‘Edward knew what it was like to say over and over again the names of those you had left behind,’” Tony reads.

He pauses. The kids watch him intently, wrapped up in the prose, the scenes and the words playing in their heads. Every one of them is conjuring a different image, a different understanding from the same sentences, the same clauses, the same narrator.

Words, words, words.

Tony likes telling stories, he finds. Children wait with bated breath for the next line, like he’s the most interesting person in the universe. He is not Iron Man here, like he is everywhere else. He is just Mr. Stark, Mr. you-can-call-me-Tony, the guy who comes and reads for book time.

“‘He knew what it was like to miss someone. And so he listened. And in his listening, his heart opened wide and then wider still.’”

On the bad days, he’s nearly bedridden with pain.

He eats and it comes back up, and the toilet bowl gets a taste of his meals instead.

He doesn’t quite remember what good days feel like yet. They existed, at one point, but any memories of them are eclipsed, hidden under fifty-foot shadows. Good days are expunged data.

During the mediocre days, he can read aloud from an armchair, surrounded by a small army of children, doing his best to keep his hands from shaking.

“‘You must be filled with expectancy. You must be awash in hope. You must wonder who will love you, whom you will love next,’” Tony reads.

He begins to come more often, as a supervisor for Tuesday arts-and-crafts. It’s nice. He likes it. He watches kids make strange drawings, staining disposable tablecloths with scented markers and sharpie. At the end of the sessions he drops markers back into their proper bins, indigo into indigo, turquoise into turquoise, peach into peach.

__

Tony agrees to therapy. Meds are part of the discussion, but Dr. Jeong doesn’t think they’ll be necessary for now. He likes her. Her job is to understand, to crouch over the tangles of his brain and help him pull the knots free, but she never pretends that she gets it.

This has gone on long enough, happened enough times that it’s obvious even to his head, dense as cadmium, that this won’t just pass.

At the very least, Pepper deserves to see him try. Rhodey deserves to see him try.

It’s a compromise; they didn’t coin the phrase uphill battle all willy-nilly. It’s a crutch, and maybe Tony needs to learn and accept that he needs one.

It is a crutch, not a fix, and Tony will accept that, too.

When Tony speaks with Dr. Jeong, it is about nukes through portals. Howard, Captain America. How he was almost twenty-two-years old when he discovered that his fingers wouldn’t stop trembling if he went more than a few hours without a drink.

It is about stars, it is about space. The dreams are sparser, now, but he’d rather they not happen at all.

Sinew, filament, nerve. Control. Commanded only by his own whims. 

__

_nov_13.mp3_

“Hi, Peter. It’s Pepper. It’s been…. Six months, now? Give or take. Tony’s doing better. It’s a crazy work in progress. He’s getting through every day. He’s eating, he’s sleeping, though it still doesn’t seem like it makes much of a dent. Like I said, it’s a work in progress. 

I’m taking care of him. He’s taking care of me, too, even if he doesn’t realize it. He’s trying so hard—you know, yesterday he made me carbonara and a side of roast veggies? Years ago, he could hardly microwave something properly. Allegedly, he’s a genius…

I hope you’re alright, Peter, wherever you are. That you have your aunt, and your uncle. Your mom and dad. And if it’s not too big of a favor, say hi to Tony’s mom, too, won’t you?”

__

_nov_18.mp3_

“Delmar’s—the bodega you like—is still open. I saw Murphy hanging around the chips. He’s got a big tail. Like a puffy quill pen. 

Also? Number five, extra pickles, smushed down real flat? Pretty good. A bit too much bread, though.”

__

December arrives with zero fanfare.

The winds are fierce, More loosely packed snow ends up twirling in circles, forming miniature cyclones that leave as quickly as they come. The sky is a perpetual white, a monochrome that stretches from one end to the other until it is too far away for the naked eye to resolve.

If summer has gummy fingers from melted ice cream—because kids only lick the tops of their cones, letting the parts closer to edge of their cones melt and drip into the crevices of their palms—winter has clumsy hands handling icing tubes, the sugar and butter mixture _somewhat_ on the actual cookie but mostly very much not on the cookie.

Somehow, it takes up residence in hair, under fingernails, around the wrists.

To put it simply, kids are _gross_.

On December 20th, the heater’s on full blast as all the children sit around the fold-out tables with vinyl covers. Tony is sitting on a pink IKEA chair that’s far too small for him. He’s next to Morgan, watching as she and everyone else do their best at assembling their gingerbread houses.

They are God-freaking-awful at it.

Suzy keeps stealing Morgan’s gumdrops and Tony has to call Angie to split the two up before Morgan loses her shit.

She’s still fuming a bit, and the fact that she’s not the most adept at squeezing icing out of a tube is no help. She grips it too tightly, too hard, and the frosting comes out in thick globs that aren’t in the right place to act as glue for the next piece.

Morgan makes a noise of frustration.

“At least you get to eat it after you’re done,” Tony says in a half-hearted attempt at comfort. “It’ll still taste good.”

Morgan scowls. “This is stupid. Suzy’s stupid. I _hate_ gingerbread.”

God, this group of small children has more drama than the shit Tony’s heard from Peter’s high school complaints.

Tony stifles a yawn.

“Darn, doesn’t that complicate things. It’s whatever, squirt, gumdrop sidewalks are totally overrated.” He holds out his hand for the icing tube. “Can I try?”

Begrudgingly, she hands the messy bag over and Tony scooches a few inches closer, leaning forward to draw a straight line down one of the edges. He turns to Morgan, who looks reluctantly impressed.

“You’re good at this,” Morgan says.

“I’m an engineer,” Tony replies in a matter-of-fact way. Gingerbread houses are no match for him. He's Tony fucking Stark. “I graduated summa cum laude from MIT.”

“I don’t know what summer lodd means.” She frowns, deep in thought. “I thought you were Iron Man.”

He snorts at that. What can he say, he’s a multitasker.

“A good gingerbread house doesn’t mean it needs to be drowning in icing. You gotta be patient with these things—push it out bit by bit to figure out the consistency,” Tony says. “That way, you’ll know how hard to squeeze.”

He returns the bag back to Morgan and points to the last un-iced corner of the gingerbread house’s base. “Have at it.”

The line is wobbly, but it’s not as erratic as before.

Morgan looks at Tony, anticipating something.

Oh.

“Nice work,” he says, a little stilted, a little awkward, but he finds that he means it.

Morgan nods and carefully slots the first wall to of the house on—the one with a half-moon door and a peephole and wiggles it a few times for good measure. It sticks up just fine and she does the other three by herself.

Since she’s working independently, Tony takes the time to hover around the others and pinpoint any houses with worrying structural integrity and offer some assistance. 

When the time comes to stick the roof on, Morgan calls Tony back to help apply the icing onto the triangular sides, and he obliges.

Tony swears he’s not playing favorites, but Morgan’s house is definitely the best one, even if it’s pretty messy. It’s got skittles all over the roof in no discernible pattern at all, plus a pretzel fence. She counts the gumdrop candies left and all thanks to _Stupid Suzy_ —Morgan’s words, not his, because he’s the mature adult here—it adds up to an odd number. It’d be downright blasphemous to use seven. Six? Not that much, but one can work with it. Eight? Fine.

But seven? E _gad_.

Morgan foregoes gumdrops entirely even though half an hour ago she’d been close to an angry fit and pops the green ones in her mouth. She offers Tony one that’s bright red, sparkling with granules that shimmer like crystals.

“Oh, I get one?”

“Yes, you’re my gumdrop defender. I have to give you a reward.”

Tony puts a hand over his chest. “Oh, _what_ an honor,” he sniffs, which makes Morgan giggle. The sound is kind of cute—it reminds Tony of high, jingling bells, airy and happy.

He likes her laugh. Happy Morgan sounds are rare, even though Tony’s been volunteering here for a while, now, because the girl’s default setting is just ‘moody.’

Starchy sweets aren’t really Tony’s thing, but he accepts one of the treats and lets the pasty feeling of the candy get stuck to his back molars. He chews idly while Morgan turns back to her house to admire her work.

“What do you think?” Morgan asks.

“It’s very charming,” Tony says. “Like a rainbow threw up all over Christmas, but in a cool way.”

It’s a good enough answer for Morgan, because she puffs her chest out a little and gives Tony a self-satisfied smile.

Now that she’s done, Morgan gets out of her seat to find her friend—Victor, a boy two tables down—and Tony turns to help Jiayin, who’s still struggling a little with her candy cane windows.

__

Pepper pokes her head into the dining area when Tony is alone and wiping down the counters while the workers take the kids to the kitchen to get their hands and faces washed.

When he spots her, he feels a little lighter, as he always does. She walks over to give him a peck as hello.

“Surprise.” Her arms wrap around his waist. “It looks like a holiday warzone in here.”

Tony snorts. “Yeah, this is at least another half-hour of cleaning. If I sicced DUM-E on this place he’d probably just get icing between his gears and catch fire.”

“This place is nice,” she says, and it is—it’s certainly one of the nicer facilities that have been set up post-decimation. Tony doesn’t know if lucky is the right word, but bigger, more populated areas have been able to scramble enough together that kids are still eating well enough, have potable water, and beds to sleep on. He knows it’s not the case in other parts of the country, or the world.

Tony’s been wracking his brain on how to properly implement funding to amend the disparities. He can throw money at things _and_ be there, be present.

“Yup. 24-hour daycare,” Tony says. He points to all the gingerbread houses he’s carefully moved to the side of the room to set. “Look at those… implications of what a house might look like.”

Pepper flicks his nose. “Be nice,” she reprimands, smiling all the while.

She grabs another towel and helps him in trying to clean a particularly nasty, sprinkle-laden chair as the children reenter, eager to check on their projects again and paying no attention to the two adults slaving away to fix the Christmas explosion that had taken place all over the room.

Jiayin runs up to Tony and tells him thanks for helping with the candy canes again before heading off to do her own thing again.

Morgan arrives next and spends a good ten seconds staring at Pepper before the woman goes, “Hi there.”

“Hi,” Morgan says.

“This is Pepper. My fiancée,” Tony says. It still feels great to be able to tell someone that, even if it’s a six-year-old. 

Morgan gives them a considering look before she raises her hand to a shake, just like she had when she had first met Tony. Pepper sets the towel in her hand down and complies. Then, she darts— _bolts_ —off to play with the other kids before homework time starts without another word.

Tony clears his throat. “And that was Morgan.”

Pepper perks up at that. “Oh, like my uncle?”

“Yeah—just about as weird, too,” Tony says, tapping his jaw with a finger. “Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I think that name really does carry some sort of charm.”

“ _Charm_ is one word for it.” She stifles a laugh. “I think that this Morgan’s much cuter.”

“You think that because you didn’t see her face when her gumdrop supply was being compromised—for a second we were in real danger of a nuclear winter—”

__

Before they leave, Angie rushes over to where Pepper and Tony are buttoning on their coats, holding a thick dossier. Pepper takes it out of the young woman’s hands and undoes the string, pulling out sheet after sheet of construction paper folded into halves with childish scribbles of poorly drawn snowmen and Santas, chicken scratch _Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings_ and _Merry Christmases_.

When they get home he and Pepper sit on the rug by their electric fireplace, backs warmed by the flames, and flip through the cards. Pepper puts a hand over her mouth and makes no small amount of _aw_ noises.

The cards are all specifically addressed to him. The snowmen have Iron Man heads, the Santas have repulsors, or they drew his iconic helmet with a pom-pom hat.

There’s no Iron Man suit in Morgan’s card. Her rendition of Tony is recognizable by the dark black triangles she added to the side of the figure’s face to be his goatee. Otherwise, he’s in civilian clothes—a simple shirt and a pair of pants. Drawing-Tony is smiling and standing next to Gerald the alpaca—the latter of which is a concept Morgan seems very committed too—as well as a small, brown haired girl on its back.

__

_dec_20.mp3_

Tony presses record. Then he stares at his device for a full minute, silent. He doesn’t quite know what to say.

Words, words, words.

__

On December 21st, Tony comes to in a dark place, and immediately thinks _Fuck, not again._

But he is alone. He is only ever alone at the end.

He takes a step, everything reverberates like a puddle, becoming more solid. Under his feet are islands of solid ground.

Tony advances, and, like rivulets of liquid mercury, the flow of his nanotech that move according to their programming, his surroundings become material.

First the carpet, and then pixels and bytes of chairs, tables, a window. It’s a living room, painted in brownish wooden hues and tacky décor.

A room. No outside, no windows, no space, no stars. A corduroy couch, floral snitching on throw pillows. It’s lit only by the glow from an old CRT television set, the blocky kind of TV monitor that’s been obsolete since the early 2010s. In the lower compartment of the oak cupboard sits the video recorder, carrying the footage that Peter is watching with mild interest.

_A Charlie Brown Christmas_ plays on the screen, it’s animations grainy and ever-so slightly distorted in the comforting way VHS tapes are. God, his brain is so fucking weird. 

Something jams through Tony’s sternum and makes a grab for his heart, which hammers to the beat of his thoughts.

He stares at the boy curled against his fleece blanket, hair unkempt and curling in loops against his forehead. There’s the suggestion of a smile teasing at his lips.

Peter is paying no mind to the man standing next to him at the foot of the couch, looking straight ahead as Charlie and Linus skim the tree lot and find the only real tree among a myriad of pretty shiny plastic ones. Charlie picks the skinniest baby sapling and takes it home.

_Peter_ , Tony mouths, mouth dry. _Pete_.

Off-script. It’s time to go off-script, just this once. He tries again.

“Kid,” Tony says, breathless. “Peter.”

Oh Christ, he can talk. The words are his.

Peter doesn’t react.

He steps closer. Tony moves to sit next to Peter—and as he does, the teenager finally seems to notice him and even turns around.

This Peter does not speak, but he looks up, in slow, molasses motion, the right side of his face framed by the television light. His emerging smile splits into a full grin. Soft neon, soft pastel. 

The expression of delight almost makes Tony flinch—and then he does when Peter opens his mouth.

_If he says he loves the stars I’m gonna lose it_ , Tony thinks. _This is a goddamn retro living room, and an ugly one at that._

“Mr. Stark!” Peter says. “Hi. I didn’t notice you.”

He pauses, like he’s forgetting something. Tony can see the loading icon over the kid’s head.

“Oh! Merry early Christmas.”

His chest floods with something like relief, something like joy.

_Hi_ , Tony thinks. _Hello, hello—_

_there’s so much I want to say, I wish you weren’t gone, please, I hope you never blamed yourself for what happened, how could you say sorry to me when all you ever did was try your best, kid_

He scooches back into the cushions, twisting so that he’s facing Peter; Peter moves in synchrony with him, following his movements like a reflection would.

They’re face to face, just a foot of space between them.

“Is there something you wanna say?” Peter asks. Through a laugh, he adds, “You look constipated.”

There is so much he could lay out. Right here, right now.

_I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Why wasn’t I there for you? Why didn’t I spend more time with you? What good does it fucking do that I’m thinking all this now?_

_You’re gone._

Tony purses his lips but does not move them further. His tongue does not shift between his teeth, molding syllables.

He pulls Peter into a hug.

The unhesitant kind of hug, where his entire arm drapes across Peter’s back. It had gotten broader—more flesh than bone—from when Tony first met him. Peter had been growing up.

He’s not small, not the least bit lanky—he’s lean the way an acrobat ought to be.

His kid is not a _child_. Peter is—was _, was—_ in that transitional period, walking the line between boyhood and a young man, where he’d been deciding his future and half-heartedly listening to Tony’s hints about university. Children change so much in the space of just a year or two—they learn humility, they learn restraint. They learn where they will fit in, in this still-new life of theirs. 

And Peter will look like this forever.

His eyes prick with tears. He doesn’t know what to expect from here. Is this overstepping? They’ve never hugged before—just quick pats on the shoulder, a rushed tousling of hair. 

Tony blinks rapidly when Peter melts into the embrace, wrapping his arms under Tony’s and pressing his cheek against his shoulder.

Peter’s chest rumbles with a content hum, soft as a purr.

The two sway, ever so slight, back and forth, back and forth.

It feels like defrosting your hands by the fireplace after a day out in the cold, doing away with the icy air that seeped through the mesh of your gloves, all the way down to the bone. It’s the snow on your wool hat melting into drops of water. It’s like the tingle of your wind-numbed cheeks, flushed rosy pink as sensation returns.

He’s so warm.

Tony’s left hand—the one that sometimes has trouble holding a cup or a pen still—moves up into Peter’s messy hair. He runs his fingers through the mass of brown. Each lock is soft and malleable; the kid hasn’t styled with any gel or spray.

“Peter,” Tony whispers, and even hushed, subdued, his throat cannot hold the name steady. It wobbles out of him in a forceful push.

All he hears is Peter’s soft, calm breaths with his shorter ones, and the tinny voices of the cartoon. His hands are clutching at the back of Tony’s sweater.

“ _Tesoro_ ,” Tony says, cracking voice be damned, shaking like a child. Clinging on for dear fucking life.

This boy is everything. This boy is _his_ child. If everyone in the world were more like Peter Parker, it would solve so many problems.

This boy is the future.

Peter doesn’t answer, but he presses harder into the space of Tony’s shoulder, head butting against his collarbone.

Merely content to share the same space.

Peter is solid in his arms, and Tony’s tears are leaving a damp spot where he’d pressed his face against Peter’s shirt.

Tony doesn’t let go until he wakes up. It’s the best sleep he’s gotten in months.

__

They don’t decorate much for Christmas this year; no one in Tony’s circle of friends is the type of aggressively push the holiday season onto others with the good intention of bringing cheer, and thank fuck for that. No string lights, no presents. No stockings by the fireplace for DUM-E and U or FRIDAY. They’re big, grown-ass bots. They’ll survive the disappointment.

That doesn’t mean any of them are trying to stew over how much life has changed in the past year; Tony locates the saddest looking tree he can find and uproots it carefully. Well, he makes Rhodey uproot it carefully, because his strength is still very much not up to snuff. Honeybear only complains a whopping three times.

“What brought this on anyway?” Rhodey asks.

His best friend shrugs.

They put the tree in a terracotta pot and bring it back to the penthouse. Tony fishes out a red bulb from Peter and May’s box of ornaments—a bin of stuff that he’d dug through yesterday before calling Rhodey and announcing that they were going on a tree-finding expedition—and hangs it on its strongest branch.

The sapling dips by an inch before the tension matches the weight.

Perfect.

It’s just him and his Pepper, his Rhodey, his Happy. He still feels half here, half there, all the way nowhere, but he’s glad he’s surrounded by these people. His people.

Rhodey and Happy get wine-drunk and sit drowsy near the fireplace while Tony curls up by Pepper’s side.

He kisses his fiancée gently on the lips and has FRIDAY put on _A Charlie Brown Christmas_. That’s a piece of animation that’s clung despite the passage of time, its shoestring budget. Hell, it’s been airing without fail every year, at least twice a week during the holiday season since _Tony_ was a toddler, much less Peter.

“Oh, you’re really sticking to the theme, aren’tcha, Tones,” Rhodey groans, and Happy hums in agreement, a little more gone than the rest of them. “Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.”

“Merry Christmas,” they all chant back, monotonous.

Rhodey pours himself a glass of eggnog and offers one to Pepper. They say cheers. Happy doesn’t participate, because he’s already knocked out.

All things considered, it’s not a bad night. It’s the closest thing he has to being happy.

Selfishly, desperately, he wishes that he was.

__

Tony scrolls up their chat history. Scrolls, scrolls and scrolls. Scrolls some more.

**Peter Parker**

Active 8 months ago

DEC-24-17

[22:40] hey mr stark :)

[22:40] merry christmas eve!

[22:41] [photo]

[22:45] Is that a firetruck

[22:46] ya

[22:47] And you’re just in a t-shirt? Isn’t it cold

[22:47] haha may and i were making christmas cookies and set off the smoke alarm but it should be fine :)

[22:48] everyone is waiting outside the building while the firefighters do their thing so we’re gonna go huddle up in 7/11

[22:48] Okay let me know if your body starts shutting down

[22:49] ok!

[22:51] Signs of hypothermia include shivering, slurred speech, low energy, clumsiness

[22:51] Loss of consciousness

[22:53] lskjaljd are u on webmd

[22:55] I’m not a doctor Peter

[22:56] [photo]

[22:56] may says hi!

[22:57] That’s the stink eye not hello

[22:58] :(

[23:15] Has loss of consciousness taken place yet

[22:17] nah

[22:18] Shame

[22:19] please be nice 2 me i can’t feel my toes

[23:27] ok sick we can go back in i think our neighbors hate us

[23:27] merry christmas again mr stark!! see u tmrrrr

[23:28] also since the cookies burnt can i just buy you some reese’s cups

[23:29] from 7/11

[23:31] Well fuck I was looking forward to eating roof shingles

[23:32] Merry Christmas

[23:34] :) <3 <3 <3

__

**Peter Parker**

Active 8 months ago

DEC-24-18

[21:06] Hi kid

[21:07] This is stupid and probably not productive

[21:15] Merry Christmas

__

Tony sleeps, hoping for a starless night.

**Author's Note:**

> bleugh
> 
> sometimes you remember tony was privately educated before enrolling in MIT so he probably knows All The Pretentious Literature
> 
> i hope whoever dropped in enjoyed this! as usual, thank you for reading, and i am always excited to hear back. 
> 
> happy holidays! love you all!
> 
> [my tumblr.](http://www.mindshelter.tumblr.com/)


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